Digital Twin + Blockchain

You’ve known SAP Leonardo as our brand for the Internet of Things (IoT), but transformation at scale is more powerful when we consider IoT as part of the broader digital innovation picture.

Which is why today at SAPPHIRE NOW, we relaunched SAP Leonardo as SAP’s digital brand, a digital innovation system that enables customers to rapidly innovate and scale that innovation to redefine their business for the digital world.

With our expanded definition of SAP Leonardo, we now have all the ingredients to not only explore innovations in IoT, blockchain, machine learning, and analytics, but also to scale our ideas with design thinking and new innovation services that enable real digital business transformation. The expanded SAP Leonardo portfolio enables companies to analyze and take real-time action from the massive volumes of data that are created by IoT and innovate with new technologies.

According to Ian Gertler, founder and CMO of Symplegades Inc., “IoT enables teams, organizations, and industries to embed sensors in virtually anything, connect those things to networks and gain additional streams of real-time data to enhance analytics and pattern recognition to drive actionable insight, efficiency.”

This quote is part of a new collection on insights from 30 industry experts. We agree, by recognizing the power of embedding SAP Leonardo innovations into business applications and processes, we are bringing SAP Leonardo to customers and partners to power their new applications and make existing applications more intelligent. We are helping companies to innovate and seamlessly scale so they can become digital businesses.

That is why I am very pleased that we can also announce new innovations in SAP Leonardo IoT. At SAPPHIRE NOW, we just launched the next wave of value for SAP Connected Assets with a new digital twin offering. I have to say, with some pride, that I believe our digital twin is superior, driven by the strategic tuck-in acquisition of Fedem Technology last year. Fedem has more than 30 years of experience in engineering simulation and structural analysis.

The digital twin reduces the need for a physical inspection and replaces it with a “digital inspection.” Model-based digital twin technologies will become an essential part of our SAP Leonardo IoT portfolio. In this context, engineering simulation software will no longer be used exclusively by engineers. Through SAP’s digital twin, the use of advanced structural analysis software is expanded from design-time to real-time, thereby enabling digital representations of physical assets to reflect reality through simulations based on information from sensors.

By bringing together a leading simulation solver with SAP’s machine learning and cloud capabilities, the physical state of an asset can be understood at any time and used for innovative maintenance and operations strategies. For example, this technology can be applied to asset management of wind turbines that are remotely operated and exposed to varying environmental loads. Their control system is traditionally based on generic algorithms and maintenance actions which often follow pre-defined plans.

SAP’s digital twin enables operators to implement adaptive control strategies as well as improved predictive maintenance tactics based on the physical condition of the system at any time, using a digital representation of the real asset. This is already implemented in a pilot project with ArcticWind:

The digital twin innovation is a tremendous opportunity for our customers to innovate and truly run live. Manufacturers and operators are now able to optimize the design and operations of a wide variety of industrial assets, particularly in remote and hard-to-reach places.

At SAPPHIRE NOW, we also shared plans to co-innovate with customers and partners on blockchain, IoT and digital supply chain leveraging SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain service. Use cases for IoT and digital supply chain include registration of events from initial product design and approval process through manufacturing and delivery to customer; inventory replenishment based on blockchain’s ability to validate signatures and orders; and validation of product providence and authenticity using blockchain. In a more complex digital supply chain scenario, different suppliers might also be able to submit their offers directly to blockchain.

For companies and partners wanting to hear firsthand the feedback and value of collaborating with us in general and plans for scenarios applying blockchain, I invite you to attend my theater session on May 17 from 1:00 -1:20 p.m. Rey Gonzalo, CTO of Moog, will join me to talk about how we are co-innovating to integrate blockchain into the aerospace industry.

We have also launched a dedicated website for blockchain at www.sap.com/blockchain. The site provides SAP employees, partners, and customers with an easy and simple resource to educate themselves on blockchain and learn about SAP’s blockchain areas of interest and priority use cases.

Dr. Tanja Rueckert is president of IoT and Digital Supply Chain at SAP